News | Our Client is Going Back to Work

Our client is going back to work. The Acquisition Search Corporation (TASC) made it
possible. Some investment bankers can help clients improve their finances. At TASC,
clients entrust us with the quality of their lives.

A company majority owned by our client has acquired the service business and operating
assets of a privately owned corporation. The Acquisition Search Corporation initiated this
transaction, negotiated it on behalf of and acted as financial advisor to the buyer. The
acquired business is a 3-time Inc. 500 provider of equipment maintenance and repair
services to a service industry. It has an innovative, information technology-based
approach to managing client relationships and more technicians in a single metro area
than anyone else in its industry.

Our client has made a career of running successful businesses. He has applied an
extraordinary work ethic and the ability to build strong personal relationships to create
extremely loyal customers and employees and to turn these into well above average
growth and profits. In the wake of a failed predecessor and on a shoestring investment, he
built a distributor into an earthmoving equipment manufacturer’s largest dealer in the
Western Hemisphere and second largest in the world. (“It didn’t seem fair,” he says.
“Number one had the whole country of Italy. All I had was north Georgia.”) When the
manufacturer decided it wanted to own its largest dealers, he reluctantly sold to them. He
learned he enjoyed neither working for a large corporation nor retirement.

He decided to buy another business, not just because he wanted to be richer but because,
for quality of life reasons, he felt he needed to get back to work. He then proceeded to
make many of the mistakes of others with little experience in buying a business. Drawing
on a large and loyal network, he sought introductions to companies actively seeking a
buyer. The result was wasted time, disappointment and frustration. He concluded that socalled
sellers were talking to him because no one else was interested, their price and other
expectations were unrealistic or they weren’t really committed to a sale.

Deciding he had had enough, he sought out The Acquisition Search Corporation and our
approach of buying a business that isn’t for sale, one whose owners have good reasons to
consider a sale but aren’t actively seeking one. We quickly agreed he needed and wanted
a lot of help. He asked TASC to take primary responsibility for:

Helping him define his broad objectives for an acquisition

Specifying criteria that would support these objectives

Finding businesses that would fit these criteria, weren’t seeking a buyer but that would be open to serious discussion of a sale for reasons that didn’t involve an unrealistic price or bailing out of a failing company

Deciding what he could offer them that would draw them into serious negotiations without the expectation of an excessive price

Contacting them and generating their interest

Assessing their attractiveness as acquisition prospects

Valuing them and structuring and negotiating offers

Together with other professional advisors, whom we helped select, managing due diligence and closing.

The Acquisition Search Corporation successfully did all of this and more. We generated a
high degree of interest in an initially reluctant seller. Amidst an extremely unfavorable
economy and capital markets, we structured and negotiated a transaction that provided
considerable shelter from these external risks. The transaction was embraced
enthusiastically by both buyer and sellers. For our client, the expected result will be not
just the return on his investment but a great job and the return to a way of life he has
sorely missed.